Passive Income, Syndications, Real Estate, and Retirement

Mindy Jensen:
Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast show number 264, Finance Friday edition where we talked to Jenn about the end of the financial independence journey and coming to terms with leaving your job.

Jenn:
I’m not comfortable with this whole situation. I’m very nervous. Mindy, I hear you talking about your husband who was reluctant to pull the trigger even when you guys knew you could afford to do it. And we’ve talked to a financial consultant and they were like, “You can do this, but we thought they meant you have to sell everything to be able to do it.” And we’re like, “They just don’t understand our situation.” I won’t know if I can do this until I talk to Scott and Mindy.

Mindy Jensen:
Hello. Hello. Hello. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my high level finance knowledge co-host, Scott Trench.

Scott Trench:
There’s something here up with alpha and beta that I’m too slow to come up with, but thank you, Mindy. Great to be here.

Mindy Jensen:
Alpha Beta is the shopping center, it’s a grocery store in California. Anyway, Scott and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else to introduce you to every money story, because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone no matter when or where you’re starting.

Scott Trench:
That’s right. Whether you want to retire early and travel the world, go on to make big time investments in assets like real estate, start your own business or just tweak your $4 million retirement level portfolio, we’ll help you reach your financial goals and get money out of the way so you can launch yourself towards those dreams.

Mindy Jensen:
Scott, today’s episode is fantastic and kind of the epitome of our attorney’s disclaimer, which says the contents of this podcast are informational in nature and are not legal tax advice. And neither Scott nor I nor BiggerPockets is engaged in the provision of legal tax or any other advice. You should secure own advice from professional advisors, including lawyers and accountants regarding the legal tax and financial implications of any financial decisions you contemplate. Jenn is our guest today. She is at the end of her financial independence journey. She, in my opinion has made it. Of course I cannot guarantee that she will be set for life. I cannot guarantee that she will never run out of money. However, all of my experience, all of my financial knowledge has looked at her portfolio and all of her expenses and all of her everything and said, “She is probably got the highest chance of success of anybody that we’ve talked to on all of these Finance Fridays that we’ve ever done.”
So we talk a lot about some high level things today. It’s more of an advanced show. I hope that if you’re not an advanced listener, you still listen for some ideas to plant seeds for when you become an advanced financial independence person. When you get to a point where your money is starting to work for you, there’s a lot of things that we might introduce to you. If you’re newer on the journey, there’s some things we might introduce. If you’re later in your journey, the concept of the margin loan, we talk about a little bit. That was something that I learned what? 20 episodes ago, 60 episodes ago when Tony Robinson was on, he brought it up. So the point of the whole show is just to bring out some ideas and to talk about the fact that she’s doing pretty good.

Scott Trench:
Yeah. I mean, she’s doing fantastic. This is one of our higher net worth guests that we’ve ever had on the show. And I think again, like Mindy said, we’re not going to be going and defining a ton of terms and that kind of stuff. We got a little bit more advanced using terms like cost segregation analysis and real estate professional and advanced ways to harvest cash from portfolios and that kind of stuff. And we will generally go back and work with folks that are at a different level and would want to explain those different types of things. But for this episode, rolling with that made a lot of sense. We hope you learn a lot. And this is the end state to aspire to in your financial journey. If you can build something like this, you’re going to have a lot of options in your life, like traveling to Europe for maybe an indefinite period to be with your family and have some unique life experiences.
All right. I want to give The Real Estate Podcast just a quick tip, we’re going to do one of those today because we saw something really fun on in the Facebook group. Daniel Mills, who’s actually been a guest on our podcast in the past. He posted an article linking to the US savings bond earns 7% with inflation protection right now. So there is an opportunity out there to get a 7% yield on a savings bond but there’s some caveats to research like the money might be locked up for the first year, yada yada. But I thought that was a really good tip that I would share with everyone because, hey, there’s a place to get a 7% yield on that. I think there’s a limit of up to like $10,000 per individual or something to that effect. So do some research on that and learn a little bit more but might be worthwhile looking into this week, thinking about a US savings bond if you’re looking for a little bit of diversification or another investment opportunity, something worth researching at least.

Mindy Jensen:
Yes. And normally I don’t like bonds but I really like a 7% yield bond. Thanks for the tip. And thank you, Daniel, for sharing that with us. Jenn and her husband live in a medium cost of living area and they think that they can retire in the next couple of months but they want a second opinion. We actually have a lot of things to cover today. So we’re going to jump right into it. Jenn, welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast.

Jenn:
Hi Mindy and Scott. Thank you so much and having me on. I’m so excited to be here.

Mindy Jensen:
We’re super excited to talk to you today. Before we jump into your income statement, let’s get a little bit of background about your situation because you do have a bit of a specific situation. So describe your current income and living specifics.

Jenn:
Sure. So I have a regular W2 job that I’ve been in for a very long time. And my husband is in the military. He’s been with them for 24 years or so. He bounces back between being an active duty person to reservist.

Mindy Jensen:
Yeah. How does his pension work? How much time does he have active duty and how much time does he have reservist?

Jenn:
Yeah. So normally with active duty, we would be looking at you retire at 20 years and you can start collecting your pension and some people will take that and you can get a second job and you’re okay getting both streams of income. With reservist, they have a certain age at which they can start to take the pension. And so every year that he gets assigned an active duty year, it brings down the number of years he has to wait before his pension starts. So at this point, I think we’re at 56 where he can start to collect his pension. And then the pension would be an average of the last three service years I believe.

Mindy Jensen:
Okay. And how old is he right now?

Scott Trench:
And how long is that?

Jenn:
He is 47. And how long…

Mindy Jensen:
Okay. So about nine years.

Jenn:
Nine years before he can…

Mindy Jensen:
Before he can start collecting his pension.

Jenn:
Right. Yeah. That’s Right.

Mindy Jensen:
Okay. So let’s look at income and expenses. How much is coming in and where is it going?

Jenn:
Okay. Sure. So my side is pretty easy. W2-wise after all of the retirement is taken out and taxes and benefits and stuff, I see about 7,000 of that. I make about 130 to 140 a year, that’s including the annual bonus. And then my husband when he’s active duty, like he is right now, he’s about the same. But we have an interesting way we divide up our paycheck. So we do the 80% to the joint fund and 20% you get to keep in your own account and spend however you’d like, and no questions asked, that sort of thing. So really of his income, I only see 4,000 a month, no matter how much he makes, we just let that go. 4,000 goes into the joint account. So that’s the regular W2 stuff. And then we have about 6,000 that comes in from syndication cash flow.

Mindy Jensen:
Per month.

Jenn:
Per month.

Scott Trench:
I love the way you set that up. Obviously you guys both earn really good incomes with that. But I love the, I get to spend two, 3000 bucks and you don’t get to take a look with that. I think that’s a really healthy way to approach joint finances, especially in your circumstances where you’re both earning similar amounts and have that freedom with that. That’s rally cool.

Jenn:
Well, actually started because we weren’t. And when he is in his normal civilian job, there is a bigger disparity in our incomes. And so he is somewhere in the maybe 90,000 which is why the 80 20 felt more fair instead of a set amount, because it was 80% of your income no matter what you make and you get to keep 20% of that. So it really came about when we had kids and it was the well, who’s paying for what stuff. And we patterned it after some friends who had this setup and we felt like this really was a good way to avoid many fights.

Mindy Jensen:
So this was a conscious decision. You had a discussion about this, you decided together this is how we’re going to handle our finances.

Jenn:
Yes. Right. Yeah. And we went to one single joint credit card and we put everything on that credit card so you can see that at the end of the month who spent what. If there’s any question about what it is, we can pin each other real quick and say, “Hey, what did you just spend in such and such store? I just want to make sure it’s not fraudulent,” and that sort of thing. And then it gets paid from the joint account. So there’s never really any problem there.

Scott Trench:
Awesome. Because I get a sneak peek about your assets here with that. Could we maybe get like a three to five minute background about how you got into this position in your personal finance journey?

Jenn:
Yeah, sure. It’s interesting. The liquid cash side of things and the syndication stuff all really grew in the last year. We used to own rental property. So we had 13 doors, mostly in Washington state. And in this last year of COVID, we actually decided to liquidate everything. So we went from being really busy full-time working folks with 12 local tenants who we would try to manage on our own. We weren’t using property managers. Also we would buy them. They were underutilized, they were older homes that needed a lot of renovating. So we felt like after two years of being back in Washington, we felt like every weekend was spent demoing, cleaning up yards and cleaning up after tenants or answering the plumbing calls and doing all of this. And so just this last year actually, we sold off all 12 doors from Washington. And We still have one rental in another state but a single family that’s really easy to manage. But we sold all of that and then we put it all into syndications. So that’s where the bulk of it comes.

Scott Trench:
From. So let me just ask a couple of probing questions here because I have a sneak peek here and it looks like your net worth is north of $3 million, is that right?

Jenn:
That’s correct.

Scott Trench:
Awesome. And you guys have really good incomes right now but it sounds like that was not the case, even just a few years ago at least for both of you guys with that. Could you give us a really high level overview of your careers on that and how you accumulated those 13 properties to then redeploy into syndications?

Jenn:
Yeah, it goes way back. I mean, we did it the traditional way. I mean, we saved up 20, 25% and we would just do it low and slow. Right. Actually, first home was a condo in the Bay Area and I used family financing. So basically my parents, they took a HELOC out and were able to give me a head start because they could put the 20% down. And this was before I knew how to do any of this, that I could do a 3% down or anything fancy. We just did 20%. That’s all we knew. We did 20% down on this condo. And I house hacked it without knowing that I was house hacking. I was by the university and I could rent out the room furnished and I got $900 for the room. I had a two bedroom. And so all I needed was one bedroom and then got to rent out the other half.
Then I met my husband and we had to move because of the military and the housing crash happened and I couldn’t sell it. So we became landlords and we found a fantastic renter who ended up being in the unit for, I think five years. But because those first couple years were so easy, we was just hands off. We never had to do anything with her. My husband became open to the idea of rental properties and being in the military, he had deployed a couple of times and had a nice little nest egg saved up and didn’t know what to do with it. I mean, he had it in CDs and maybe this is 2008, so maybe he got 5% interest. I don’t even know it was that good back then.
But we were in Southern California at the time and he knew he wanted roots in Washington. So he used his saved money to buy a home there because we weren’t living in the area at the time. We were able to get it as a second home. So we did not need 25% down because it was a second home and there was no requirement to live in there for a year. We could rent it out. So that became our second rental. We moved back into the area and coming from California, you move into Washington and you think, “Wow, the housing prices are so affordable here,” that I was like, it just felt like they’re on discount. And it was. It was 2012, 2013, 2014. So we were able to buy another single family home, that was 315,000. And even at 25% down again, we just had the savings for that because of…
I think we both lived pretty frugally. We both come from fairly lower middle class, really blue collar families who we didn’t live extravagantly. So it wasn’t a big deal for us to not spend our entire paychecks the whole while. And so from there, it was like some 1031s and savings and we scaled up. I found BiggerPockets and Brandon Turner’s discussion about the multiplying factor. So instead of buying single families, I was like, what am I doing? So we went to small size and had duplex and triplex, and that’s how we ended up at 13 units over the course of, I mean, five years, I think five, six. I mean, it was a long process to get there.

Scott Trench:
What I’m gathering is a 15 to 20 year personal finance journey here with that with you and your husband. I imagine your income is increasing during this period up to the 130, 140 that you’re earning today with that. That’s really interesting nuance with the deployments because I think you get additional pay for those types of things. And so that was a nest egg that he’d accumulated with that. There’s a little bit of family help to get started but this is an awesome, highly repeatable story for a lot of folks with this, that there’s nothing-

Jenn:
Slog.

Scott Trench:
… fancy about it. It’s just a 15 year story of hard work and making some smart investments over that and building up a pretty strong position that we’ve got today.

Jenn:
Yeah. And taking and selling those single families or those single units and turning them into multis really helped us to scale up pretty quickly in those last… Then we were buying one, maybe two a year and really changing the paradigm, changing some of them from long term rentals to short term rentals, to really amp up the cash flow, reinvesting the entire amounts back into the business. We didn’t use any of that money for personal spending. And so by 2021, the housing market in Washington was hot. And we knew we were moving. Landlord laws in Washington was getting to be more questionable for us. And so we just decided it was time. We had already started to dabble in the syndication world. So yeah, that became our primary focus.

Scott Trench:
One last question here before we get into this kind of stuff, because I think everyone has a lot to learn from what you’ve done here. Actually, a two part question. One, you’ve alluded to it already that it was just a lot of work and all that kind of stuff but can you walk us through the decision to liquidate that entire portfolio that you’d built and move over to syndications with that and then mechanically, how you went about that. How did you learn how to invest in syndications? And did you do things that were to be tax efficient like 1031 exchanges?

Jenn:
Yeah. Where do I start? We did do the 1031s. So the first one was the condo. The first property that I lived in California, it was a one outlier at the time. And housing prices there had recovered since 2008, 10 and this is probably 26 team now. And the long term tenant that we had put in there from the time we moved to Southern California, she was leaving. So it felt like the right time to do it. So we did 1031 there into, I can’t remember, a duplex or a triplex. So we took advantage of that probably twice. I think we took a single family and we also used 1031 into a triplex.
It wasn’t until we heard of BiggerPockets money, no, not money, the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast, where I think you had Kathy Fettke from Real Wealth Network on, and then you had another one with Joe Faris, Ashcroft Capital, that I learned about these other passive routes. So at that point, I think we had just maybe hit over one, one and a half million in net worth so we qualified as a accredited investor. So we got on calls with the various people at the company. I think I spoke directly to Joe at the time and just felt them out to understand what they were about, what their company was about, where they’re investing, what their strategy was. And I think it was a lot like what you guys covered in the money podcast you guys did on syndications recently. And I can’t remember his name off the top of my head but you…

Scott Trench:
I think Mindy has found that for us.

Mindy Jensen:
That is Jay Scott, episode 219 of the BiggerPockets money podcast. You mentioned Kathy Fettke. She was on episode 225 of The Real Estate Podcast. And Joe Faris was on episode 227 of The Real Estate Podcast.

Jenn:
So you can see it like, I believe and I live by your voices in my head. All your guests I’ve reached out to you and I’ve touched base with them because I found the [inaudible 00:20:12] side to be so interesting because our work life is already so busy. We have three kids, we’re running around the scout meetings and swim practice or this and that, that adding in the remodeling and things like that just got to be too much for us. So we started off with small amounts. I mean, the minimum required with each of them into one project just to see how it went.
And so I think with Joe Faris, it’s been since 2016, we’ve been with him and we’ve grown our investments with him. And now we’re at about 1.6 million in syndications. A lot of that about 600,000 of that came from the equity of the sold rental properties. So we were able to 1031 our rental property proceeds into DSTs. They don’t earn quite as much as the other syndications but it gave us a way to avoid taxes and still be in real estate to hedge against inflation and be hands off and get regular cashflow and then hopefully appreciation at the end.

Scott Trench:
I love it. Thank you for sharing that with us. We can go back to this. I think it’s super valuable for folks when we have someone, you may have the highest net worth of any guests we’ve had so far that we’ve done on the Finance Friday. So I think it’s really valuable to hear the story of how you got there with this. So thank you for sharing.

Jenn:
Yeah. I mean, I think some of it’s luck. I know we don’t say it’s all luck but we invested on the West Coast where equities, it just really grew over those five or six years and that really helped out.

Mindy Jensen:
It’s luck and it’s taking action.

Scott Trench:
For the last 10 years, I’ve seen a lot of people pooing the West Coast as a place where you can’t make money but I see millions of dollars in net worth here generated from West Coast style investing. So I think that’s the old appreciation versus cash flow game. And they’ve been saying the West Coast is overpriced for the last 30 years, right? I mean, we talked at one of our long time forum posters, Jay Henriks on the forums was like, “Yeah, it was overpriced back then but I still bought a bunch of property.” And so I think there’s something to think through there. You can’t bank on appreciation but you can’t ignore is a potential factor either because it may cost you millions of dollars, and opportunity cost with that. So thank you again for sharing that and congrats on all the success here.
Let’s go through your income statement and net worth statement here and understand the position and then figure out how we can help you with that. So we just talked about income. We’ve got about 14,000 in after tax income from both the jobs. And we have about this 6,000 incremental on top of that from the syndication investments that you’re saying is about what you can pig the cash flow from those at.

Jenn:
I actually, I think I have it as 17,000 on average. So we have 4,000 from my husband that I see in the joint account. I don’t know how much extra he takes home. And then I have 7,000 from me and then 6,000 from the… Are you not counting the cash flow from the syndication?

Scott Trench:
Nope. Thank you. That’s perfect. 17,000 in after tax income or spendable cash flow is coming in each month is what I’ve got. Is that right?

Jenn:
Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.

Scott Trench:
Okay, great. I think I misspoke on the 7,000 each. Okay. And then on the expenses side, how much are you spending? And is there anything that we should look at there?

Jenn:
This side is going to seem heavy and large. So here we go. Our home, everything is escrow so this is pity. 3,200. We owe about 545,000 at 2.8 or 2.9%. I do have a Tesla. I know I might get some hate for that. And that’s 1200 a month. We decided not to buy it outright because the interest on that is 2.5%. And I owe 68,000 on it. Groceries, we probably spend about 1200 a month. Daycare for at least one more year. I have a two and a half year old is $1,200. Utilities is a little bit on the high side. We have 500 pegged for utilities because our electricity bill is so high. We have kids activities at 400, restaurants 250, car insurance is 250, home maintenance 300, internet and mobile 100. And then the rest is small. I mean, we’ve got some subscription things, maybe at 100, 150.

Scott Trench:
And so what does that total to?

Jenn:
So that’s the hard part, and this is why I’m not sure if I can pull the trigger when I want to because I feel like our monthly expenses fluctuate so much. We might have a home project where right now I’m putting in a patio cover and that’s going to cost me so many thousands of dollars but that’s not normal. And that’s just like that one month or I painted the house and that was $3,000. And so I can’t look at every month and say, this is how much but if I had to average it out, I think 9,000 is fair.

Mindy Jensen:
Okay. So you are spending $9,000 on average, but again, let’s go back to that income. Are you bringing in $3,000 a month? No. You’re bringing in $17,000 a month. What do we say Scott? Spend less than you earn. You’re spending $9,000, which seems like a lot if you just make that statement but then you bring back that I make $17,000. Well, you’re still spending way less than you earn. So could you cut your expenses? Absolutely. You don’t need a $1,200 a month car payment, but can you afford a $1,200 a month car payment? Absolutely. That’s my mortgage payment, but that doesn’t matter because I’m not making $17,000 a month, so that’s okay. Your expenses are personal to you. And I saw this. I’m like without context, I saw your $1,200 a month in car. What is that?
So I added it all up. I’m like, well, if she got rid of the car loan and the daycare, she’d be at 5,500. Well, when you get deployed to overseas, are you going to take your car with you? You probably aren’t. Although I don’t know. Can you? What side of the road do they drive on there? Daycare might go away. If you can’t work over there, maybe you stay home with the kids. Maybe you sell the house and then you don’t have the mortgage either. Like your expenses are fluid to look at your expenses and say you have $9,000. Well, okay. What is it? 25 times your expenses. So 25 times 9,000. Wait, no, I’m doing this math wrong. 9,000 times 12 is 108 times 25 is 2.7 million. And how much do you have? More than that, so you’ve made it,

Jenn:
It just doesn’t feel like it. I look at our accounts and I’m not sure I can feel the growth every month. It feels very risky. We do have some brokerages and I don’t know if we should keep them there, especially if I decide to retire early because I don’t really get the whole pulling a 4% and paying yourself. It’s easy for me to understand it through syndication. I get the check in the mail, the rest of it is still sort of earning. It’s still compounding on itself because the GPs are doing their work to improve the property. And so there’ll be this big capital event hopefully at the end. But with stocks, I feel like it’s so risky.

Mindy Jensen:
Well, past performance is not indicative of future gains but look at where your income is. Let’s take your income out of the equation. We’ve got your seven. We’re just going to throw that away. Now we’ve got perhaps four and the additional income of six from the syndication, four plus six is 10. That’s still more than you’re spending at nine. You’re not going to be able to add a roof on the back porch or whatever you said every month but conveniently you don’t have to do that every month. You can’t paint the house every month for $3,000, because you’re only going to have 1,000 dollars left over. But with those numbers and this $9,000 a month in spending, you can still save 1,000 dollars a month without you having to work. So based on these numbers without cutting anything, you can keep all the things you have and still retire because your passive income and your husband’s income is more than what you’re spending.
Now if your husband were to retire too without any source of income, you would have to change your expenses because spending $9,000 a month and having $6,000 a month coming in means that there’s $3,000 a month going out. You would have to make that up somehow. You could very easily do that through your investment portfolio, which is still which we haven’t discussed yet. I am jumping ahead but there’s a lot in the stock market that you have. So I don’t see a way that you are doing bad or that you could not retire today in any one of these options but I’m getting ahead of ourselves.

Scott Trench:
Well, let’s go through the investment portfolio. Let’s go through the investment portfolio next. So we know we’re spending nine and bringing in 17, which is great. That’s more than almost a 50% savings rate, which is fantastic. And you just did that for a long period of time it sounds like.

Jenn:
So assets-wise. We have about 590,000 in brokerages, 110,000 with the stock purchase plan or work purchase plan. So I don’t get a discount. I’ve heard you say something about folks getting a 15% discount when they buy, I don’t get that. I just don’t get charged a fee to buy. Some of this, that stock purchase plan was grants so they were at half the strike price but our company has not done as well as I would’ve liked them to. So it’s 110 there. My 401k. So I didn’t realize we had a Roth 401 until a couple of years. And we may not have actually even had a Roth until a couple years ago. So I have a total of 956,000 in my 401. Of that 40,000 in the Roth 401. So I’ve changed my asset or my deductions. I still put a little bit towards the 401k because the traditional, because I felt like I needed the tax break and then I didn’t have anything in Roth and so I contribute to the rest of the percentage. Our company matches dollar for dollar up to 6%. So that’s where that one is.
So like I said, syndications about 1.6 million. I do some peer to peer lending at 25,000. We still have about 200,000 in cash to deploy, which some of it would be our reserve but that’s more than we need for reserve. And so I’m very anxious about the fact that we’ve got so much cash sitting underutilized. So our primary home, we do have equity in it even though we owe 500 and something, we have about 300,000 in equity here. We own a rental home in Alabama and we have about 50,000 equity there. And I didn’t even talk about the cashflow from that. It’s like $500. So like I said, that goes into our business account. We don’t see it. It all just compounds on itself if we need to pay for something, comes out from the business account. So I don’t really even consider it.
And then the military pension I said, it’ll kick in about eight or nine years. And he thinks it’ll be around 3000 a month. My work pension is tiny because they quit contributing to it a few years after I started working. So that’s only at 43,000. I have an HSA at 40,000 because I can’t contribute to that anymore either since we get the military insurance healthcare. And so you can’t double do. And then we have a 529, which is at 43,000 and we have a GI bill that we can hand down to one of the kids as well.

Scott Trench:
What do you peg that net worth at? I can’t calculate it that quickly, which is a good problem. So what do you peg it at with all those items?

Jenn:
Personal capital says, we’re at almost four million.

Scott Trench:
Okay. And then your pension, which is going to be the 36,000 annually and guaranteed by the federal government. It’s a federal pension, I imagine military pension with that, let’s call that another million dollar asset that will be realized in eight or nine years with that since it’s essentially an annuity at that level, with that. Although maybe it’s worth less than that today because you can’t access it, but in nine years will be worth an incremental probably one million. That’s my back [crosstalk 00:34:09] after evaluating that.

Jenn:
He does have a railroad pension.

Scott Trench:
[crosstalk 00:34:12] four to five million dollar net worth.

Jenn:
He’s a railroad pension at 401 there too that I don’t count. Again, a lot of his funds, I don’t really count. They’re a little bit smaller and I don’t know that it makes a huge difference to our bottom line.

Mindy Jensen:
It doesn’t, send it to me. So before Scott, I know you’re going to make some really amazing point, before you do. I want to point out that his military pension is 3000 a month and your syndications currently are 6,000 a month, that equals 9,000 which is your current expenses, which is another way that the math adds up to say, you can retire. Now Scott, make your brilliant point.

Scott Trench:
Well look, I think this is really interesting. Because you have soared past the finish line for what I think a lot of folks would set their financial goals at with this. And I know based on what I’m talking to you with this kind of stuff that most of these assumptions or many of them are conservative evaluations like that 1.6 million you have invested in the syndications, that’s what you’ve invested in the syndications. I bet you not what they’ve actually accrued to if they’ve appreciated in value with that. I bet your home equity assumption is conservative. I bet your rental property valuation is conservative with that. I bet you that you’re not even counting certain assets, and I’m just going to use that as padding with that. Is that accurate in terms of the conservatism in your position?

Jenn:
Yes, but that’s because I feel like it fluctuates so much, like all of that is funny money unless it’s cashflow hitting… It’s that old mentality of that W2 that hits your account every month, it’s reliable. You think it’s reliable. It’s consistent and it’s there. Like our brokerage is fluctuating. There could be 500,000 on a bad red day when like COVID or variant hit and my gosh, we lost 100,000 in a day or one of those syndications, the hurricane hit the apartment building and they never cash flow after that.

Scott Trench:
Well, I think it’s a fascinating psychological challenge. We talked about the four levers of personal finance. We have spend less, earn more, invest and create. And what I think is fun or funny in your situation, like the challenge is that the earn more lever is very irrelevant at this point. It’s ceasing to become the relevant option. When you start off, it’s how little do I spend, then it’s can I maximize that earning potential from many who start from that median spot, then as the investments pile up, that investment approach means more and more with that and then there’s always an option to create or start businesses with that. What I’m seeing in your situation is you’re bringing in 130K, 140 annually pre-tax and post-tax, that’s probably what? Like $90,000 in cash with that.
I mean, your portfolio at four to five million dollars at a 5% yield on that is going to bring in 200 to $250,000. So it’s more meaningful to manage your portfolio by a lot than it is to bring in active income at this point, which I think is a challenge. And there’s going to be good years. There’s going to be bad years with those types of things, it’s going to fluctuate as you pointed out. But I think that’s the levers changing on you. And maybe you haven’t even noticed it or thought about it quite that way with the past. But that’s, I think your reality right now, great problem and create a situation that I’m comfortable with.

Jenn:
Right. Yeah. I don’t know that I’m comfortable. I’m not comfortable with this whole situation. I’m very nervous. I think, Mindy, I hear you talking about your husband who was reluctant to pull the trigger even when you guys knew you could afford to do it. And we’ve talked to a financial consultant and they were like, “You can do this,” but we thought they meant you have to sell everything to be able to do it. And we’re like, “They just don’t understand our situation.” I won’t know if I can do this until I talk to Scott and Mindy.

Mindy Jensen:
I live in a very weird FI bubble. I live in the same town that Mr. Money Mustache lives in. People come into this town, people move here to live near him. I live by a bunch of FI people and it’s sometimes hard for me to remember that not everybody has this huge reinforcement community, but all of my friends are unemployed. I know so many people who have reached their position of financial independence, have left their jobs, their finances continued to grow, their investments continued to grow. Some of them have a spouse with a job. You’re in a really great position right now. My husband calls himself wife FI because his wife still works. You are hubby Fi, we call it that because your husband will continue to be able to generate income. I have friends who they’ve both quit and they have gone and traveled.
Go back and listen to episode 55 and 55 and a half with Bryce and Kristy from Millennial Revolution, they left their jobs. And I think the next day, the stock market crashed or something like that. They had a horrible set of circumstances immediately following their retirement. And they were able to weather the storm through their cash cushion and yield shield and something else that rhymes. But they are able to easily explain how they did it. And they also tested their portfolio over the course of three years before retiring. They’re like, okay, we’re going to keep making all this money but we have enough saved up. We believe we’re going to start withdrawing from our portfolio and we truly can live off of it. I have a friend Todd, he lives up the road and I’m going to have him on the show to talk about life after retirement, because we don’t really focus enough on that topic. And it is difficult to make the transition from, I have a job and I’m saving for FI to, what am I going to do?
I mean, you make really great money. We didn’t applaud you for your fabulous salary. Now you’re willingly leaving that. You’re just saying, “I don’t want to make money anymore. I’m going to quit.” And that can be tough. It took Carl a whole year to come to terms with that. And then when he quit, two weeks later, his entire job was canceled. So if that had happened two weeks before, maybe he wouldn’t have been as comfortable with it as when it was his choice. But you’ve got a really great set of circumstances in several different viewpoints. I don’t see your situation as a bad one. Although I do have a question about your syndications. Currently, they’re sending you $6,000 a month. Are these long term hold syndications or are they value add and then they’re going to sell them syndication.

Jenn:
It’s variety.

Mindy Jensen:
So what happens when those syndications sell, what are your plans to do with that money when it sells? It’s becoming harder and harder to find a good deal. So are these syndicators now like they used to promise 14% returns. And now I’m seeing a lot of eights and sevens and some of these deals you’re like, why are you even buying this property? This looks like a terrible investment. And some of these syndications, and I haven’t looked at anything that you’ve mentioned. I’m not currently investing with Joe or Kathy so I’m not talking smack about them. I don’t know anything about what they’re offering but the ones that I’m seeing just don’t seem to be that great. So what are your plans to replace that $6,000 or whatever part of that isn’t currently going to be held long term?

Jenn:
It’s interesting actually. So the 6,000 is what we currently bring in but like I told you when we sold our properties this year, we pushed a lot of those proceeds. The ones that we did in 1031. So we decided to pay cash on some of the properties that we didn’t own for as long and didn’t make over. We didn’t make over 200 and some odd thousand on the sale, we decided to eat the tax on that so that we could put it into syndications which would give us a better return than the DST types. So we have two big ones that they’re more stabilized properties. The DSTs earn us four and a half, 5%, nothing great. And they’re 10 year holds and we just started. So we have a long runway with that one still. And then the other ones are shorter, anywhere between three and five year.
And we started almost five years ago. So actually we’re just starting to reap the benefits of those capital events starting to come in. And with some of this syndicators, they’ve given us the option to roll it into the next deal, which have been on similar terms. So fortunately, or they’ve actually created funds and we’re split between because we know we’re retiring early, we want the cashflow up front so we get the 10% cashflow as opposed to the lower 7% with the potential of the big earning of the capital event on the end. So we split our funds between those different options.
But yeah. So I say 6,000 today but again, we have been investing throughout all of 2021. And so that means that some of them actually haven’t even started to cash flow yet. So in 2022, I anticipate another bump of maybe two to 3000 more in cashflow from the investments that we made this year that will start to show up next year. And then we won’t see those capital. We may see one or two capital events every year kind of because of the staggered timeframes on all of them. And we’re with private syndicators, we’re with different platforms, the different big platforms that you see, equity multiples and realty moguls and portfolio. So that’s the plan so far.

Scott Trench:
This is where I get to say I told you so on she’s being very conservative with the estimate she’s putting in from her syndication portfolio. Perfect.

Mindy Jensen:
I’m going to point out to you, Scott, how easy she is able to rattle off these answers. She seems like a researcher or a numbers nerd. I bet she’s got spreadsheets for days.

Jenn:
I’m not as great as I’d like to be with the spreadsheets for sure but because [crosstalk 00:45:50].

Mindy Jensen:
My God, how good do you want to be?

Jenn:
I worry about these things so much. So I’m like your husband and I look at the charts every day, the stocks every day, even if I’m not going to trade it. I mean, I know daily where my stocks are.

Mindy Jensen:
Good. Good. If you enjoy that, good.

Jenn:
It’s partly a sickness I think.

Scott Trench:
Let’s deal with the immediate future. When are you moving to Europe?

Jenn:
That should be August, so this summer.

Scott Trench:
Okay, so you’re moving to Europe and you can’t continue your W2 job when you go to Europe.

Jenn:
Yeah. There’s not the option to work.

Scott Trench:
Yeah. To me, I think this has been a great discussion and I think we’ve learned a lot from you but I think the path forward that I’m seeing here is incredibly straightforward with this. The best thing that you guys can do right now in my opinion is map out what it’s going to cost… How long are you going to live in Europe?

Jenn:
He’s there for a school. So it’s not that long six, seven months. But I would like to turn that into a year or two to give the kids an opportunity to bounce around Europe and learn history firsthand.

Scott Trench:
Great. So I think the best thing you can do is say, I’m going to construct my… You have very detailed understanding of your current expense profile. What’s it going to look like when you go to Europe, are you going to sell the home? Are you going to sell the car? Are you going to do that? What is your expense profile going to look like? And how do you have plenty of paddings? So you can go and see all the things you want to see, whether that’s the Louvre or travel around and hit 15 countries while you’re there or go to sporting events. I would want to see the rugby world cup, which will be in 2023 in France. So those would be things that I would put in place and go through. And that exercise will tell you a lot.
It probably will be around the same cost as your current lifestyle expenses with that. And you don’t have a choice because your current job is not going to allow you to do that. And at least in terms of keeping your current job, and with what we’ve discussed today, why not take the six months and take a sabbatical. You’ve had what sounds like a very continuous career here for a long period of time. If you decide to restart your career six months after taking a sabbatical, no one’s going to bat an eye about that. I went to Europe after working for 15 years of my previous jobs or jobs, and then tore around with my kids while my husband was deployed there. That is a wonderful thing to put on a resume, not a detractor from that and you can always go back to the job.
But I think what you’ll find is that managing your portfolio during that period, well, you’ll realize just how irrelevant, it’s not irrelevant but how much less relevant the earned income from your job will be compared to the increasing levels of sophistication. I am sure you will continue to apply in your free time to your investment approach with these syndications and other things with that. That’s a better allocation of time in building your net worth anyways, and probably mostly passive. But I could see your housing expense dropping to a large degree or staying about the same. I can see your car payment decreasing substantially during that six to seven months. I can see the cost for child care declining unless you choose to do that in that period. And you may not need anywhere near that 9,000 to fund that.
And then second, I don’t mind you having 200,000 in cash at all on that. That’s 5% of your portfolio. So it seems like a lot of cash but that would be the equivalent of someone with 100,000 dollars in net worth having $5,000 in cash. So I don’t actually think that that’s a crazy amount to having cash. You can always drop it to a certain degree but with what you’re doing here, that could be a responsible choice especially as a syndication investor, you might want to look at some of those opportunities as they come up from time to time and have some of that on hand. So how’s that for…

Jenn:
That’s certainly the struggle. As I get to my last couple 100,000, I get opportunities that come through the inbox and now I’m much more careful with how I allocate it because I feel like these are my last few choices, at least for a while, or buying another… Sometimes I listen to your BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast. And I get the itch to get back into the game and I think, I should have a bigger nest egg. And then I look at my 401k and I think, well, that’s just sitting there and I don’t feel like that’s necessarily doing me a huge favor. Maybe I should be making better use of that.

Scott Trench:
Here’s another fun one to consider. And why again, evidence that maybe even more application in that you’re actually going to build more wealth by leading more… If you were to stop working for this six months and spend half of that time, 20 hours a week, just getting more advanced with your approach here, here’s one mental model. I don’t know if this will work or not but something to explore. If you become a real estate professional by meeting that minimum requirement, syndications often have huge losses in the first year. That’s by design, right? So if you’re investing in a syndication and let’s say you get a bunch of money back all at once and you plow all this into syndications and they do a cost segregation analysis, sorry, this is a very advanced episode and I can’t go over all of these terms but cost segregation essentially allows you to declare a lot of depreciation for those listening on this.
So let’s say you invest 400 grand in syndications that do these cost segregation analysis, and you have a loss of 500 grand on your tax return that year, that is a great opportunity and you’re a real estate professional to move a lot of that 401k money out and into a Roth. That’s a great opportunity for a conversion of that type with that. That would theoretically potentially be possible. We’d have to talk. That is beyond my expertise, I’ve never done that. So it would be where an advanced tax council to come into play. But those are the kinds of things that might be really interesting to you over the years if you wanted to move that money me from the 401k to the Roth, you can have a year, great, my tax returns is going to show a negative $500,000 loss. I traveled to Europe, didn’t earn any income, husband still earned income. I got some syndication income but that was way offset. And now I’ve rolled 300K into that. Those are really advanced tactics that I think may apply to your position with this.

Jenn:
And then once it’s in the Roth, can I invest? Would you recommend invest any more into real estate? I probably almost 50 50 with equities and real estate but if I convert the 401k money then I would be leaning a lot heavier in real estate.

Scott Trench:
I think you can answer that question for you much better than I can with that. I think there’s a point to grow and there’s a point to diversify and you’re probably leaning into the diversify point because you’re like, I want to just sustain this for an indefinite period of time with a huge margin of safety with that. I think you can do that to a large extent. So it’s whatever you feel as a very comfortable diversified portfolio would be my guess. But yeah, I think that makes perfect sense. If you have all this stuff in syndications, keeping all that disproportionately in stocks would be a logical move on the path of diversification.

Mindy Jensen:
I’m going to lean on my attorney and say, you should seek your own advice from professional advisors, including lawyers and accountants regarding the legal tax and financial implications of any financial decision you contemplate. This specific one, because there is the potential for an enormous benefit and tax deduction and depreciation versus income. And neither of us are CPAs. This is where spending even $10,000 on a CPA to get advice to be able to make some $500,000 dollar, a move that saves you hundreds in taxes, thousands in taxes. This is a really good bit of that’s money well spent in my opinion. So I would say if this is something you’re considering, and I know you’re going to do your own research first, if it sounds like this is something that you’re going to be able to do, talk to a CPA before you make your big moves and have them give you advice on how you can structure that best so that when it comes time to make that move, you reap all the benefits of that particular tax deduction, depreciation, whatever. I don’t even know the right words, D word.

Scott Trench:
Absolutely. And by the way, I am by no means telling you to do that. I am simply saying options like that may be available to you and they will help you build your net worth after tax potentially with far greater leverage than your day job, based on your overall position at this point with this. And so that’s just the framework is that lever of managing your investment portfolio, which you’re already good at but becoming a master is probably a better use of time than working your day job at this point, based on what I’m seeing here, the options like that may become available to you.

Mindy Jensen:
Yeah. No, I think that’s a really great point to bring up Scott is that if you are invested in these syndications and you’re doing all of these big depreciation moves or have the opportunity to do these, you could have a huge tax advantage to swap that out. But yeah, definitely talk to a CPA. I have a question for you regarding your car and house while you’re in Europe. When you said you were going to Europe, I thought this was going to be a long term thing but one year definitely isn’t a, “You should sell your house kind of thing.” I thought it was like four years. So with one year, what are you going to do with your car and your house? Are you going to rent out your car on Turo and put your house on Airbnb?

Jenn:
I considered, I have floated the idea with my husband, not so much Airbnb but with the traveling nurses because we did short term rentals in the 90 days. So I liked that idea. My husband’s not as comfortable with folks being in our house with our things. So I’m still working on him. I’m working on him for those angles to reduce our expenses while we’re out. And now that we’re even talking about it, I mean, I wouldn’t be opposed to selling my car for the time being and just picking that back up when we got back, maybe I downsize. I have the biggest one right now, the biggest and most expensive one but that was because we were settling things around to the rental properties in addition to the three kids. So I felt like I needed the bigger one and maybe I can get the more cost effective one when we come back and I can get rid of that payment altogether while we’re gone.

Mindy Jensen:
I’m going to give you another research opportunity and say that there’s that chip shortage and cars are becoming a little bit more accessible but they’re still really difficult. Carl, talks about Tesla all day, every day. And he said, the wait list is now 12 months. So perhaps you sell the car when you get ready to go but put yourself on the wait list now.

Jenn:
That’s true.

Mindy Jensen:
And just keep putting yourself on the waiting list. It’s like 100 dollars to get on the waiting list but it is a significant wait so be aware of that. I don’t know what Turo’s policy is. I know that they are very, very, very careful with the cars and they take care of their owners. At least they have in the past, Craig Curelop was on this show. He rented out his Prius and he’s like, “This is going to be my last rental and then I’m just going to take it off Turo.” And then that last person trashed it, got in a huge car accident and totaled it. And they gave him a lot more money than it was worth. I don’t know how that works with Tesla because they have their own special insurance. So definitely a research opportunity. But I know that Tesla’s are desirable. Maybe you know that too, so you could make a lot of money and then keep it when you get back, keep it until your new one comes.

Jenn:
Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. I think he might be more open to us renting out the car opposed to the home. Do they have to pick it up at your house?

Mindy Jensen:
No.

Jenn:
Yeah. I mean.

Scott Trench:
I just want to point out here that we do need to focus on these because they will be meaningful to your Europe trip and potentially your retirement plan in general because half of your current expenses, half of the 9,000 is between your mortgage and the car payment and then utility is another 400. So if you don’t rent out that house and offset those costs, you’ve got to generate an incremental 3,500, 32 to 3,500 per month in order to cover those costs with that.

Jenn:
So this is where being military also may help because they’re moving us there. So they will pay for housing so that would help cover housing costs that you leave behind.

Scott Trench:
Okay. So they’re going to cover housing costs in Europe. Okay. Fair enough.

Jenn:
But we’ve always tried to take advantage of still pairing down so that we can pocket as much of that as we can so that we’re not frivolously spending it. But yeah, it’s been a tough sell to him too. I mean, I was thinking even maybe we have a detached garage, maybe we can rent out just a storage space or something. But I’m on the same page as you. I feel like we should be doing something with this huge expense. I’ve seen you can rent out your pool.

Mindy Jensen:
Yeah. You could rent out a lot of spots, get a storage [crosstalk 01:00:04].

Scott Trench:
I think that’s right and I think it’s fair to say, “Hey, I don’t want somebody sleeping in my bed,” or on those types of things. So you could always hire movers for two, 3000 bucks or whatever that costs both sides of that and then put it in into self storage or into your garage, reset it with something that’s really cheap. It just depends on how long or how far you want to go with that. If you’re going to be gone for six months, then that doesn’t make sense. But if you think this is going to set you up for a long term retirement, you want to be there for two years, then that’s probably a very good move to do that kind of stuff. And you can probably furnish the place lately or there’s probably some combination of things you really don’t want the tenants to deal with, some things that you’re fine with them using and some things that are in between with that. But I think that’s a probably a 30 to 60, $70,000 decision-

Jenn:
Yeah. Agreed.

Scott Trench:
… with that and the car.

Mindy Jensen:
Yeah. I would lean towards showing him the stark numbers. “Hey, this is how much it’s going to cost us to leave this house bare. This is what we could generate.” And let’s say you have a five bedroom house. You could lock one bedroom up with all the good stuff and just put a big lock on there so nobody gets in there and then you’ve still got the rest of the house. It’s nice. They can take care of it. I haven’t heard too many horror stories about traveling nurses being slobs. I’ve heard a lot of really nice stories. They’re just there to sleep. They go and they work and then they leave and they go to another place and they’re just there to sleep. It’s not like you’re renting to… And it’s a nice area, so you’re going to generate a different type of tenant than a tenant in a rougher neighborhood.

Jenn:
Yeah. It would be interesting though. I mean, certainly either be rent by the room because there are five bedrooms or four, if we used one for storage or it would be a traveling nurse with her family, his or her family not to be gender biased there. So yeah. And I don’t know, it just seems like an odd unit to rent because of the size.

Mindy Jensen:
Well, and you don’t know exactly how long you’re going to be in Europe. You would hate to rent it out for a whole year, get to Europe and be like, “We’re leaving as soon as we can.”

Jenn:
Right.

Mindy Jensen:
Okay. This one ran really, really long but I think we covered a lot of really high level. And everybody considers this level questions. There’s a lot of people who are like, “How am I going to retire? How am I going to pull the plug when I actually get there?” And people are along the journey saying, “As soon as I get there, I’m going to pull the plug.” Once you get there, it can be very, very scary. And it doesn’t matter how set you are, how qualified you are. If your number is one million and you get there and you’re like, maybe two million would be better. You get to two million and maybe, three million would be better. It’s called one more year syndrome. You can always work one more year. They’ll let you. You can always work one more year. But when you quit, I am going to look into my crystal ball, which is also a hindsight ball because my husband said this three years ago when he left, I wish I would’ve done this sooner.
I bet within six months you say, I should have done this sooner. And that is fine. You need to get to the position where you are comfortable retiring. Because I can sit here forever and tell you, “I think that you are ready. I think financially you are set.” I mean, if I was in your position, I would say, “I know I am financially set.” I’m not going to say that to you because the contents of this podcast [inaudible 01:04:09] in nature and are not legally tax advice. I don’t see any way unless the entire world just blows up because the sun explodes. I don’t see any way that you are going to fail in your retirement with the systems that you’ve set up. But you have to be confident too.
So I think we’ve covered a lot of things. I think a lot of people are sitting here saying, “I get it. I get it. I get where she’s coming from.” Other people just starting on their journey, they’re like, “What is she talking about? She already has four million. She’s fine.” But they’re not you. It doesn’t matter what they’re saying. All it matters is you, so you and your husband need to have a money date. Have a conversation. Talk about it and put all of your money to the side and only spend his and see that it’ll work, test it out. And then three months…

Jenn:
And then that really helps just to talk through what the purpose and rule was. For the longest time as you’re going through the journey, you get good at the savings part and then you get good at the investing part and all of that like I get it and I’m rolling along and I know how to do that. But then you get closer to the end state or what some people might think is the end state and you’re like, but I don’t know how to do this part. And it may seem like it’s like a natural well, if you have the money, you spend it and you go but how do I access it? How do I spend it without overspending it or doing it to my detriment. And then I’ve got nothing for my kids or at 60, I need to go back to work and that kind of thing.

Mindy Jensen:
Yeah. Yeah. Our net worth has increased since we retired and yes, I have a job. We haven’t been pulling out of the funds but our net worth has increased a lot since he retired. Did I say since I retired, I meant since he retired. I still have a job.

Scott Trench:
Yeah. I was going to say, hoping that there was no news today.

Jenn:
We can’t handle any more meetings.

Mindy Jensen:
Hey Scott, let’s talk after the show. No, our net worth has increased rather significantly since he retired and the stock market has been going crazy. And I have a lot of faith in Bill Bengen and his 4% rule. I think we’ve kind of covered everything, I want to hear back from you after you no longer are employed.

Jenn:
Yeah. Certainly.

Mindy Jensen:
And see how it worked out. See how you came to terms with the separation. See if you took my suggestion to put your money to the aside and see if you could live off of, without your funds and see the results of you and your husband’s money dates and just all of the things. I’m very excited for this.

Jenn:
All right. Yeah. Me too. So a few more months and I’m nervous but I’m excited too. Nervous excitement.

Mindy Jensen:
Okay. Well, that’s awesome. So we’ll check in with you in three to six months.

Jenn:
Okay.

Mindy Jensen:
Okay. Great. Well, we [crosstalk 01:07:27] Jenn.

Scott Trench:
Thank you so much. This has been a fantastic conversation.

Jenn:
Thank you.

Mindy Jensen:
Yeah. This has been a lot of fun.

Jenn:
Yeah, I appreciate you guys.

Mindy Jensen:
Okay. Okay. That was Jenn and her amazing story. As you were talking in the intro, Scott, I thought to myself we should have a discussion in the Facebook group about all of these terms. If you are listening and you’re newer to the site, you’re newer to the show, you’re newer to some of these concepts, ask some questions in our Facebook group. “Hey, what does DST mean?” That stands for Delaware Statutory Trust. I don’t really know anything more about that except what it stands for, but it’s some sort of advanced investment strategy. And I will start off the Facebook group conversation by saying, “Hey, what’s a DST?” And somebody who’s smarter than me can come in there and tell me what it is. So if you have a question about today’s show, please hop in the Facebook groups, facebook.com/groups/bpmoney and let’s chat about these high level investment strategies that Jenn is doing.

Scott Trench:
All right. Well, we went really long today. So Mindy, should we just go ahead and get out of here?

Mindy Jensen:
From episode 264 of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, I am Mindy Jensen and he is Scott Trench saying be sweet, [inaudible 01:08:47].